#hearthlang

I've begun work on a second edition of the Hearthian grammar, and one thing this entails is coining scientific vocabulary, including Hearthian names for the atomic elements. Here's a glimpse at that.

Prehistoric elements

Some elements can just be dug up out of the ground and are therefore easy for a low-tech culture to identify. The names for these are short and opaque: brant (iron), diyr (gold), oog (lead).

Noble gases

As humans did, Hearthians first identified helium from the light emission spectrum of their sun, hence the name grotyrn "sun-air". Neon is ykliimyrn "float-air" for being less dense than the atmosphere; conversely, argon is liimyrn "heavy-air".

Readers familiar with Hearthian morphology may ask, why is "float" ykliim instead of yliim? That's because it's underlyingly yk-ol-liim "un-apply-heavy"; the l in ol is deleted by contact with the identical l in liim, and the o is subject to intertonic vowel deletion. The k in yk is brought out by a vowel to the right, and it stays even if that vowel goes away.

Heavier noble gases were named for their atomic numbers: krypton is linkyrn "36-air", xenon omdathligyrn "54-air" (lit. "one-three-zero-air"), and radon rozrozrozyrn "86-air" (lit. "two-two-two-air"). This fallback strategy applied to any element that hadn't been isolated but was predicted to exist.

Biochemical elements

Timber Hearth life was based on carbon, or railok "charcoal-stuff". The atmosphere was mostly nitrogen (ypthyrn "un-breath-air") and oxygen (zakyrn "fire-air" for its role in combustion). Metabolic processes require water as a solvent, which is made of hydrogen, aptly named vizyrn "water-air".

Sodium (klornzok "salt-crystal-stuff", a self-explanatory name) is necessary for nerve function and fluid balance, and magnesium (chornzok "spinel stuff" for its presence in that gem) plays a critical role in synthesis of DNA.

Hearthians shared our hypothesis that alien life could substitute carbon with silicon (drinzok "quartz stuff"). The only alien species known to them, the Nomai, were also carbon-based.

Arsenic and mercury were named for their poisonous properties: respectively zerchril "stop-heart" and zerchan "stop-nerve". (Cinnabar ore is tyvzyrch, from tyev-zerchan "red-mercury".)

Elements found in minerals

Many elements were named for gems and rocks that contain them. Sodium, magnesium, and silicon are mentioned above. Beryllium (kimkrok) comes from beryl (kimkor), boron (chimvok) from borax (chimov), aluminum (targraz) from corundum (taree), sulfur (zaktrok) from pyrite (zaktir), potassium (ympvok) from feldspar (ympov), and titanium (notrok) from rutile (notir).

The following text is an excerpt from the WIP grammar of Hearthian, an Outer Wilds-inspired conlang I'm creating.

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Hearthians, having three fingers per hand, count in base six. Numbers are determiners and can take the place of articles.

1 — om 2 — ronv 3 — dath 4 — yr 5 — tand 6 — gai

Numerals ronv and dath clearly stem from rond "leg" and dad "finger" with the antiquated dual and trial number suffixes, and yr may just be a shortening of eyr "(four) eyes". The other three basic numerals are etymologically opaque.

New work: Hearthian Grammar.

When the idea of the language first came to me, I wrote down a few basic details about how the grammar should work.

Quotes from my notebook:

NOUNS MARKED FOR NUMBER AND CASE. VERBS MARKED FOR TENSE AND MOOD — AND THERE ARE PARTICIPLE FORMS. DISTINCTION BETWEEN "NAMED" AND "UNNAMED" THINGS. ALL PROPER NOUNS IN "NAMED" CLASS, AS ARE THINGS LIKELY TO HAVE INDIVIDUAL NAMES: Adult Hearthians, stars, planets, mountains, craters, "UNNAMED" ARE THINGS WITHOUT INDIVIDUALITY: hatchlings, sand, water, cutlery, food, clouds

This animacy distinction based on individuality came from how the player character is never addressed with a personal name. The fanfiction The Dark Forest posits that Hearthians are traditionally named at adulthood, a tradition that fell apart when the Hatchling kept putting off naming themself even as new hatchlings kept coming around. I've borrowed this headcanon.

I sketched glosses of basic sentences.

"I saw the hatchling launch" 1sg see hatchling-acc launch-part PAST IS DEFAULT, LIKE IN FLAIDISH "I saw the hatchling crash their ship" 1sg see hatchling-acc crash-part its ship-acc

The first draft of Hearthian had case-marking on the ends of nouns, but adjectives still followed nouns. I didn't like this aesthetically, so I would later change the case-marking to be on articles (German style) and add the notional history that Early Hearthian had had head-final noun phrases and case-marking.

Knowing that I wanted this language to be like Flaidish (conlang by Mark Rosenfelder, like English but not) gave me a direction to aim for. I came up with a set of consonants, which I've stuck with up to the current draft. I didn't want it to be too generic, so I made the fricatives few in number and all voiced by default.

An lax/tense vowel system like those of English or Dutch came to me, and then I thought: what if I made this a little bit cursed? The obvious thing to do is to have the pairs be ɪ/ij, ʊ/uw, a/ɑ:, etc., but what if the pairs were ɪ/ej, ʊ/yɥ, ɛ/ɑ: instead?

And so I wrote a chain shift into the notional history of Hearthian vowels. Early Hearthian sounds [ɪ uw ow ɛ a] curled clockwise in vowel space to become [y yɥ əɥ ɪ ɛ], leaving false pairs of vowels like ɪ/ij y/yɥ ə/əɥ that aren't morphologically lax and tense equivalents.

there are two accusatives: -n and -k inanimate (nameless) and animate (named) zpern = just some fork, zperk = SPECIAL FORK zber [zbɪɹ] "tree" zberz zper "a tree's fork"

"A tree's fork" in my current draft's grammar would be om zper omz zber.

As much as I want to do a play-by-play of all my creative choices, I don't want this post to go on forever — nor to be stuck here typing forever — so I'll summarize from here.

I laid out the basics for number-marking on nouns, including vestiges of Early Hearthian's five-way number system. I made three forms for the verbs: past (lemma), nonpast, participle. Then came prepositions, adjectives, derivation, modal markers... All the way, I've been writing example sentences to test how these features work in action.

I've written some phonotactic rules down, but the syllable structure is still a bit vague. I've been taking word forms (but not meanings) from Dutch, so I haven't run into too much trouble on that front yet, but I really should pin down what consonant clusters are legal and illegal.

To sum it up: first I had a few basic grammatical ideas, then I added an interesting phonemic inventory, then came basic words, and parts of speech. I kept iterating and iterating on established ground until I had built up an edifice.

As for writing, I do have a Hearthian alphabet in the works. Lines of letters go left to right and stack top to bottom like Latin, but the letter forms are unique. It's nothing too crazy.

Added the following disclaimer to the beginning notes of the Hearthian Grammar:

The Hearthian word lopel [ˈlɔpʰɪl] means "gift". It comes from the verb lop "droop; descend" with the diminutive suffix -el. The idea is that a Hearthian of higher standing bestows a gift to one of lower standing.

The Hearthian adjective ykniyech [ˈəkʰ.nij.ɪtʃʰ] means "immortal". It decomposes to yk-knii-ech "not-die-ish".